You can't learn to walk if you haven't tumbled down a good deal in doing it. It is often failure that means ultimate success. Of course if a girl keeps on saying: "Oh, what's the use?" about everything she does and all her failures, there isn't any use. In weak moments that sort of thing can be said of every great and worth-while experience, of love, of joy, of sorrow, of work. But a girl who allows herself to take this attitude is a "quitter," and doesn't know the first principles of playing the game.
Part of the joy of work consists in the mere delight of intellectual exercise, delight in thinking a thing out. That is the way we develop ourselves mentally, just as we develop ourselves physically through sports. The mind that thinks is capable of deeper and broader thinking. Thinking begets thought. A muscle that is left without exercise softens and finally atrophies. The same is true of mental muscle. If this strength is left unused it is gradually lost and cannot be recovered. Mental concentration, the thought that is so strenuous that everything else is shut out, strengthens the mind. In this wonderful old world no new land has been discovered without physical effort. There is no country of the mind which can be entered without a similar effort.
And there is another and very important joy in work—the sense that one is being equipped for the work of the world, for usefulness. The mere feeling that one's powers are being developed brings joy with it. There is still another joy which every one of us must covet—the sense of entering into the intellectual riches of the world, its wonders of science and art and letters, with the feeling that we have a part in a great treasure, a treasure which, unlike gold and precious stones, men have never been able to gauge or to exhaust. Such gold and silver as we take from that adventure cannot be lost or stolen from us. It remains with us to the very last, and with it no life can ever become really poor, or dull, or old.
VII
FAIR-PLAY
Few students realize how closely a classroom resembles a commonwealth. To most of us it seems a place into which we go to have a certain amount got out of us, or put into us. This conception of the classroom is unworthy the modern girl who has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the meaning of team-play, of playing all together for a common end, a game or a republic united by a tacit compact.
Does the average student feel responsibility for the game of basket-ball or lawn hockey which she is playing? The first thought of the girl in answering this is that it was a foolish question even to ask. Of course she does. But for her classroom? No, that is a different sort of game, in which the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of the instructor. It is a one-woman or a one-man game, and very often the students are but spectators, cheering or indifferent, approving or disapproving. The pupil does not hold herself accountable for this game; it is the teacher who makes the class "go," who extracts from each student the information bottled up in her, together, often, with a good deal of carbon dioxide,—a process difficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork out of a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a sort of noble rebound of effort, the exhausted instructor is to put a vast deal of information back into the girl before the student claps her book together and rushes pell-mell to the next classroom, there to be similarly uncorked, if the teacher has learned the art and her mental muscle is sufficient.
Such a conception of a classroom is not fair-play. The teacher, like the coxswain of a college crew, may have rowed over the same course and she may know it well enough to cover it in the dark; she may have won distinction upon it, may be the fittest person in all the states of the Union to cover it again, but if she has not a good or a winning crew to coach, she will never win any race, even the shortest. No instructor has shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and doing all the rowing, too. To play any classroom game in this spirit is to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure. It is not fair-play.